The Golden Book of Springfield

by Vachel Lindsay

The smoke of those torches comes between me and St. Friend. Everything on this day happens to me in such a fashion. There is much dust on the dustless streets, at least when I pass by. And many streets are unaccountably deserted, morning and afternoon, though there is a World’s Fair crowd roaring somewhere near, I know. And the dust that sweeps up with the autumn leaves from these streets has the taste of old years in it, and the grave. It seems, some moments, as though I can keep my eyes open no longer. I am not to take one step further. Some fate has forbidden me to glimpse more of my City. But there is that in my will and my soul that commands me to go forward one step further, and open my eyes for one moment longer.

And so through this evening I realize that, dimly and dizzily, the torches are being uplifted at the beginning of the star chiming hour.

Now the great Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second, is himself speaking in the cathedral, and, if he testifies for old Sparrow Short, who shall say that Short is a danger to the World Flag?

Michael says that just as freedom resides in the Declaration of Independence, in trial by jury, and the like, which are immemorial, crystallized institutions of the radicalism of ancient times, so radicals with new thoughts should have every chance with their torch in the church and not be forced to wave it in the street, and that “he is indeed glad this meeting is being held in this place, etc., etc.”

July 23:—Sparrow Short is left locked up and forgotten, for today there is a great war-music in the streets.

All Singapore is running amuck. The Horseshoe Brotherhood and the Amazons are drilling double hours. Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second, is firing his clan like an Arab Mahdi, preaching a new holy war. A new group of trumpeters are to the fore, blowing slender trumpets, all of them silver white, to frighten the Lord of Cocaine, trumpets whose cry is that of birds that the Singaporians hold accursed; the eagle, the turkey and the wild swan.

And to that music, there at Camp Lincoln, the maelstrom of cavalry goes on, round and round their gigantic mechanical toy, their simple childlike image of the earth, and its glow is turning to a glare as of a smelter-furnace door, or the blaze of a little planet, newly whirled off from the sun.

July 24:—War talk dies down and the whole town is full of hatred of its leaders and feverish silly rumors against them. More and more openly the small fry politicians of all factions seem to be justifying with reminiscent emphasis the lynching of Surto Hurdenburg as an heroic act of defiance of both the City Hall and the Board of Education. The actual responsibility for the lynching is shifted from this one to that one, but, whoever it was that led (if we are to believe the tone of the coffee houses) is a hero.

The fairly well-meaning leaders of the town, comprising the majority of both the Board of Education and the City Hall, are in new tremendous offices, administering the growing responsibilities of the World’s Fair and the war preparations also, and a gulf has been made between them and the people with whom they have been on gossiping terms heretofore.

The old war between the town and the gown seems revived, with this difference, that the natives of Springfield act like the University students, and the finest World’s Fair visitors seem the real citizens of the place, insulted at the deeds of the freshmen. The habit of turning every spare village green into a summer camp ground for passing tourists in automobiles, that has prevailed through the United States for a long time, has established in all the counties adjoining Springfield an enormous circle of village grounds, and here the great part of the Fair visitors camp by their own machines and come in to the show by day, by local transportation of all sorts. Their resentment of the frivolity of the rank and file of the city grows, and nightly they are the more appalled at the rumor as they chatter in their camps, that the Springfield mob intends to lynch wholesale the only people who have treated the Fair visitors with any degree of courtesy, namely:—the City Council and the Board of Education.